Automotive Electronics

GaN Systems will speak of lateral GaN power transistors in automotive appliations at PCIM next week. The paper ‘Lateral GaN transistors – A replacement for IGBT devices in automotive applications’ will discuss GaN devices in drive trains for hybrid and electric vehicles. “Worldwide, several groups of researchers are undertaking work on replacing silicon IGBTs in these applications,” said the firm. ...

Overall, 2014 is expected to be a great year for the supercapacitor industry. This is the prediction of technology market analyst IDTechEx which looked at last year’s industry results and estimated a 30% CAGR for the supercapacitor market in the next 10 years. The supercapacitor market will reach a value of $6bn in 2024. In an application segment such as ...

Electric superchargers and hybrid vehicles are amongst the subjects under discussion at the Niche Vehicle Network (NVN) annual symposium next week. “A number of important topics will be discussed during the day-long event, including the application of new control systems within electric vehicles, the development of new low carbon powertrains, the application of lightweight materials, and the design and development ...

Scaleo is sampling its automotive power-train chip, also aiming it at body control and driver information. Called Olea, it has two 300MHz 32bit ARM Cortex-R5F cores, one in lock-step configuration. There is also a Cortex-M0 for I/O processing. “OLEA is designed to face emission and fuel economy regulations such as the Euro 6/7 and CAFE standards,” said the firm. “It ...

XMOS is chasing automotive business by qualifying its multi-core microcontrollers to AEC-Q100. “The xCORE architecture is a fit for many applications in the automotive space, from infotainment and driver assistance to powertrain control,” said Dr Paul Neil, v-p of product management at the firm. “Completing AEC-Q100 qualification is a key step for us.” The architecture “lends itself to modular redundancy ...

XMOS is chasing automotive business by qualifying its multi-core microcontrollers to AEC-Q100. “The xCORE architecture is a fit for many applications in the automotive space, from infotainment and driver assistance to powertrain control,” said Dr Paul Neil, v-p of product management at the firm. “Completing AEC-Q100 qualification is a key step for us.” The architecture “lends itself to modular redundancy ...

IDTechEx has launched a new browser-based “Electric Vehicle Market Intelligence Portal” providing analysis of the total electric vehicles market for land, water and air. Electric vehicle companies across the value chain are profiled, analysed and benchmarked using the IDTechEx Index. There are also articles offering latest research providing distilled updates, insights, analysis as well as detailed market data and forecasts on ...

Melexis has released a fast Hall-effect current sensor for electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles, and solar generation. Response time is 3µs, for dc and ac measurements up to 200kHz, and transfer characteristics are adjustable for sensitivity, gain and offset through control parameters stored on the built-in EEPROM. There are two versions: MLX91208CAL for low magnetic fields (100-700mV/mT) and MLX91208CAH for medium ...

ALPS Electric has developed a surface mount two-pole sliding contact micro switch specifically for use in electric vehicle parking brakes (EPB). Typically the design of EPBs has used two micro switches, but this has led to problems such as the on/off timing of the switches going out of sync during low-speed operation. The SPVQC micro switches use a double-sided sliding ...

EnSilica has launched a Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) soft IP core for use in situational awareness radar sensors for automotive driver-assist applications.